


Upon a Midnight Clear

by Empy (Empyreus)



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alcohol, Angel/Demon Relationship, Angels, Awkward Sexual Situations, Christmas Eve, Community: go_exchange, Demons, Desire, Drinking, Fallen Angels, First Time, Footnotes, Frottage, Groping, Innuendo, Kissing, M/M, Making Out, Seduction, Touching, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-20
Updated: 2005-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-10 04:01:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3275939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Empyreus/pseuds/Empy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Christmas is a nice time for Falling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Upon a Midnight Clear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hlclark](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=hlclark).



> Written for [](http://hlclark.livejournal.com/profile)[hlclark](http://hlclark.livejournal.com/) for the [](http://go-exchange.livejournal.com/profile)[go_exchange](http://go-exchange.livejournal.com/) fic challenge. I wasn't given a specific prompt, only a pairing, so I let the characters do what they wanted. They got into rather a festive mood, and this is the result.
> 
> Thanks to [](http://littlemimm.livejournal.com/profile)[**littlemimm**](http://littlemimm.livejournal.com/) for giving this a once-over even though she wasn't familiar with the fandom, and to [](http://tackerama.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://tackerama.livejournal.com/)**tackerama** for cheerleading.

Aziraphale tended to drift backward in time when it came to fashion, but this time, Crowley decided, he had taken it too far. The angel had answered the door wearing something that Crowley's baffled mind identified as a rather well-preserved toga candida (1.) and with his wings extended. The dramatic effect had been somewhat spoiled by the yard-long skein of tinsel he was holding, however. Crowley had blinked at the sight, his sense of vision arguing with his brain, and had allowed the angel to take him by the hand to tug him forward, into the flat.

1\. To mortal eyes, it would doubtless have looked like a linen sheet, but Crowley knew the angel tended to take the concept of old-fashioned clothing to painful extremes.

"Isn't that a bit old-fashioned even for you, angel?" Crowley asked as he had regained his faculties of speech. He draped his snow-dappled leather jacket over the back of the nearest chair and ducked to avoid being assaulted by a small plaster cherub wielding a candy cane, then turned to face the angel.

"I find it comfortable. And it is appropriate for the season, I should think."

"I brought drink. For Christmas Eve," said Crowley, bypassing the statement in an effort to keep himself from trying to analyze the way Aziraphale's mind worked. He brandished a bottle of absinthe, lifting the virulently green spirit against the light as he followed Aziraphale into the living room. "I haven't had this in ages. I started the craze, you know," he pointed out, not entirely without pride.

"I don't think starting a drinking craze is very demonic, dear," said Aziraphale, leaning on the backrest of the settee.

"It's part demonic," said Crowley, sounding defensive. "The hangover it causes nearly earned me a commendation. And it's got wormwood in it, and that's hardly a sacred plant."

"Legend has it that you created it, you know," said Aziraphale. "That it sprang up in your trail when you slithered out of Paradise."

"This belly bred it," smiled Crowley, patting his stomach with the self-assured confidence of someone who is not quite drunk yet but tipsy. Catching Aziraphale's gaze briefly before it slid to his stomach, Crowley leered. "I'm rather proud of it, actually. Makes a terrific flavouring for drink."

"Yes," noted Aziraphale somewhat absently before catching himself and looking up with a blush reddening his cheeks.

"Aziraphale," drawled Crowley, the sibilant a long lazy hiss, "you were always such a prude."

"Angels are meant to be sexless," countered Aziraphale. "And desireless."

"I haven't done anything," said Crowley, his eyebrows rising in surprise well feigned. "I wasn't touching you, and you come over all high and mighty on me. You angels are so transparent."

Crowley moved in, dropping the bottle carelessly on the settee as he went and hearing it bounce once before it rolled onto the floor with a dull 'thunk', finally stopping in front of Aziraphale.

"Why don't you just ask for it, angel?" he asked, his voice soft and without malice. Aziraphale flinched back as the tips of Crowley's fingers touched his stomach. "I wonder what this belly would breed?" Crowley mused half-aloud, moving his fingers in slow, deliberate circles. "Or what this would breed?" he went on, resting the palm of his hand very lightly on Aziraphale's groin. "A little celestial seed to bring forth lilies."

"Crowley," pleaded Aziraphale, "please don't."

"Please don't what?" breathed Crowley. "Aren't you desireless, angel? Aren't you sexless?" He leaned in, his face scant inches from Aziraphale's. "Please what, angel?" Crowley felt the first sleepy stirrings of lust in the traitorous body. That was the trouble with human form: it tended to make its own decisions, no matter what. He had only planned to needle the angel a bit, not launch a full-scale feel-up, but he couldn't back away now.

The angel reached up, stroking his fingers over Crowley's sleek hair in a surprisingly demure gesture.

In the silence that fell, Crowley could hear the Saturday night crowd jostling on the street below. The sound never really changed, but the voices rose and fell in the same way they had in the Dark Ages, or even further back. Whether the drunkard shouting in the street wore a toga or a taffeta doublet or something in ill-advised neon colours, the noise was just the same.

Aziraphale's wings flexed, whispering as they brushed the table behind him. "Crowley," said the angel, suddenly less British and more Principalic, "this may not be the most prudent of actions."

Crowley shrugged, shifting closer in a single sinuous glide. "It might be ineffable," he whispered with a sly smile. (2.)

2\. It was a gamble, certainly, but Crowley was damned by nature, and consequently took quite lightly to finding himself in positions where he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't.

"Crowley," said Aziraphale, and the single name encompassed reprimand, warning and address.

He got no further as Crowley closed the last few inches between them and kissed him. Crowley could taste ginger in Aziraphale's kiss, a taste of Christmas that he found quite pleasant, though he would not have admitted it unless tormented in some strange and innovative way.

The air in the flat was warm and slightly stuffy, smelling of candle wax, and Crowley felt sinuous and alive in the heat. The angel had put up rather less resistance than Crowley had expected. As a matter of fact, the angel seemed a tad inebriated, and as Crowley let his tongue slide over Aziraphale's lips, he could taste the distinct tang of mulled wine. So it wasn't mere Christmas cheer that had lit the angel's pale blue eyes. Not one to outdone, Crowley responded in kind, sliding his arm around the angel's rather scantily draped waist, ignoring the alarmed twitch that this caused. He rested his sharp chin in the dent that Aziraphale's neck and shoulder junction formed, letting his tongue taste the pale skin. The angel tasted faintly galvanic, prickling with some strange energy.(3.)

3\. The effect was rather like touching your tongue to the terminals of a nine-volt battery. If you have done this, you'll know what it is like. If you haven't: don't.

Aziraphale made an admirable effort to remove Crowley's shirt without actually breaking the embrace, failed, and then tried again. Failing a second time, the angel leaned in, deliberately missing Crowley's mouth and instead latched on to the lobe of his ear. Crowley was too busy running his fingers through the angel's soft hair to attempt any sort of clothes-removal himself, and resorted to a bit of well-placed magic in the end, knowing it would irk Aziraphale. He saw it as pragmatic, personally. Why bother with the human business of getting heads stuck in jumpers and watches stuck on sleeves (to say nothing of socks left on) when one could just as well dispose of the offending garments with a snap of one's fingers? However, in his haste to eliminate togas and trousers that might trip them up, he had entirely neglected to take into the account that it is not only easy to trip over one's or a partner's ankles while walking backward, it is also likely. The absinthe bottle lying on the floor at their feet didn't help, either. (4.)

4\. A minor demon earned a commendation for that, as a matter of fact.

Down they went like something four-armed, four-legged and two-winged: with a crash.

"You old serpent," sighed Aziraphale, his wings flattened out to the sides. (5.) "I should have seen that trick."

5\. The effect was rather like a dove pinned to a wall, but Crowley was in no state to judge such things.

"Yes," hissed Crowley. (6.)

6\. This was a real hiss, not what people take to calling a hiss when they obviously want to say sibilant but can't quite remember the term and seem to recall it had something to do with relatives.

He could feel the bones of Aziraphale's wings bending under their combined weight, and he lifted his head to see if Aziraphale had something to say about the matter. The angel had been scrabbling backward in what seemed an attempt to get away from the crush, and his hair was tangled around his face, forming a rather fetching substitute for a halo.

"I think that perhaps this isn't the best of places," suggested Aziraphale, his voice wobbling slightly. "Or, well, the best of ideas." There was a distinct lack of indignant conviction in the voice.

Crowley smiled like only he could: like a snake. He slowly slid his hands down Aziraphale's sides, finding the indent where shoulder blade met wing and slowly pried Aziraphale off the floor. Despite the rather massive size of Aziraphale's wings, they were avian standard and therefore hollow-boned, and Crowley was grateful for this. (7.) The skin under his hands was soft, and he could feel the long muscles trembling slightly. He refocused his gaze on Aziraphale's face, and was rather taken aback by the open invitation in the angel's smile.

7\. This was true, as he would rather not have gone through the massive indignity of applying for a new pair of arms and having to cite "crushed by angel" as the cause of destruction.

"Thank you, dear," smiled Aziraphale, his polite tone somewhat at odds with their present state. Trust the angel to be able to retain polite and civil composure while lying sprawled out naked on the floor of his living room with a demon on top of him.

Naked. Yes. Crowley had always assumed that Aziraphale had been man-shaped in a rather roundabout way, and he'd never really thought about the full extent of Aziraphale's mortal anatomy. (8.) Crowley himself had decided (after some slight prompting Downstairs) that it was best to go all the way, as it were, mostly because it gave the demons assigned the handing out of bodies something to do. He had had to be rather specific at the hand-out, insisting that no, he would be just fine without cleft tongue and tail, thank you. (9.)

8.Unless you count a few sodden moments, one of which made one of his drinking companions, a young man called Will S--, stagger home and pen a fourteen-line poem detailing the headaches caused by stray bits of anatomy.

9\. This should not be taken to mean that the demons are intrinsically evil to their own kind, but merely that some of them take their job a bit too seriously. At least that was what Crowley thought. That one had at some point in the past been a snake should not, in his opinion, lead to endless cloaca jokes.

The human body had a few intricacies that Crowley hadn't quite been able to wrap his head around, and this was one of them. His blood had relocated, leaving precious little of it where it should be (i.e. in his head, for one). Most of it had headed south. Aziraphale seemed similarly flustered, not quite knowing where to put his hands.

Quite how they managed to get from the living room to the bedroom was shrouded in a pleasant fog, but Crowley thought he could remember a resounding crack and something rather close to a curse, and he assumed that had been the angel nearly getting stuck in the doorway. (10.)

10\. Which had been designed for normal-wide humans, not men-shaped Principalities with a wingspan of some six feet when relaxed. 

The bed wasn't quite wide enough for both of them, or, rather, the width wasn't quite long enough for them. Crowley's hands lifted as if to windmill for balance, but then his long-buried angelic instincts kicked in and he unfolded his wings instead. Sadly, they proved insufficient in holding up both him and the rather ardent angel leaning onto him, and Crowley found himself pushed down into the soft mass of bolsters. He thanked the infernal mercies for the fact that Aziraphale had seen it fit to equip his (unused) bed with eiderdown bolsters rather than a simple duvet cover, as it meant his wings didn't have to take the brunt of the fall. (11.)

11\. With lower-case 'f', mind.

"Aziraphale," Crowley meant to say, but the name came out as a soft "Oh", because it had been throttled by conflicting sensory input (12.) on its way from brain to larynx.

12\. Specifically, Aziraphale's hand on a decidedly sensitive part of Crowley's mortal anatomy.

"Oh," echoed Aziraphale, managing to look both surprised and pleased at the same time.

The part of Crowley's brain still responsible for plotting ways to tempt the angel was being shoved aside by the (admittedly) much larger part that was trying to figure out exactly when he had become the one being enthusiastically seduced instead of being the one in charge. Then his mind gave up, decided it was only right that Crowley be below and Aziraphale above (13.), and shut down in a blissful flurry of pleasure.

13\. As this rather nicely underlined the general set-up of their respective roles.

Aziraphale was humming, a low-grade hum that sounded like a particularly contented being, and his eyes were closed, shutting out the ethereal light that Crowley found terribly disconcerting. Aziraphale's hands were equally disconcerting, as they were occupied with something strange and nimble that made Crowley suddenly tilt his head back as far as his vertebrae would allow. There weren't that many fingers on a human hand, were there?

At times he was sure that Aziraphale's hands left marks along his skin, but this was not the case, unless one counted the quickly fading imprints of fingertips, something which Crowley left behind in equally large measure.

He could feel a strange heat uncoiling inside him, lacing up through the base of his wings, twining into his hair and his fingers. Crowley closed his eyes, and thought he and the angel had to look like a particularly pornographic Christmas tree decoration in their present position. Aziraphale's hand was holding his jaw, the grip a tad too hard, but Crowley found that he could put up with some mild violence provided it was Aziraphale who was dishing it out. Their wings flapped in sync, then interlocked rather painfully, and Crowley found himself in soft, feather-scented darkness. This wasn't quite what he had planned, and he could feel Aziraphale struggling to free his wings.

"Wings. Caught," managed Aziraphale once he broke the kiss, his blushed face only half visible among hair and feathers. "Let go."

Crowley attempted to obey, shifting his hold as he tried to pull his wings free, but it only served to press him up closer against the angel. There was an interminable amount of fumbling and of hands and fingers as they tried to bodily pry their wings apart, and at some point Crowley realized the pinions had long since unlaced, but decided not to care, as the sensation of Aziraphale's bare skin against his was far too pleasant to give up. The angel seemed to agree, his hands pressing into the small of Crowley's back before one slid upward to hook over the edge of a wing and the other curled forward and downward to what at present was the single most sensitive part of Crowley's body.

He found himself wishing that the angel would have, for once, a hangnail or something else to mar the perfect manicure, because the celestial perfection was driving him mad. (14.) He closed his own hand over Aziraphale's, somehow fitting his hand between their bodies. That one gesture proved sufficient. His entire body arched upward, and out of the very corner of his eye, he could see Aziraphale stiffen in a similar position, with a look on his face that might only have been described as divine ecstasy.

14\. Unless he already was mad, which he at this point found to be a likely state.

While it is true that one does not rise to the rank of Principality without being able to carry a celestial tune, it does not mean that everything uttered is pleasant or dignified. Aziraphale shouted something that would have made Gabriel drop his trumpet. Crowley, in turn, contented himself with nearly biting his forked tongue off as he leaned back to avoid being hit in the face with a wing. His own wings sprawled back against the ornate headboard, pinions skipping over the pillowcases with a rasping sound.

He could have sworn he heard jubilant singing. (15.)

15\. He did, in fact. Though of a thoroughly mortal, drunk-on-Christmas-Eve kind, courtesy of a very jolly group of carollers passing the building.

 

There was a certain amount of wing-shuffling before they were able to sprawl out on the bed (aligning heads with headboards and feet with footboards, as one should), but Crowley found he simply hadn't the energy to winch his wings in.

A hidden clock somewhere chimed, startling Crowley out of his pleasant slumber. Twelve frail chimes to mark midnight.

"Blessed Christmas, dear," murmured Aziraphale, settling a beautifully manicured hand on Crowley's chest.

"Yeah," Crowley contented himself with saying. He twitched his wing before settling down, and a handful of down floated through the air, keeping pace with the snowflakes falling softly outside the window.


End file.
